Two weeks ago, on a beautiful late summer day with the cool tang of autumn in the air, Miss Lily was born. Her arrival was in every way different from her older sister’s, starting with a slow gradual labour and ending in a flurry a mere twenty minutes after we arrived at the hospital, setting the stage for her to be her own little person. We are excited to have her with us and looking forward to discovering her personality as it emerges. Maisie is a wonderful big sister, expressing so much love for Lily. She’s also old enough to understand quite a bit and ask questions that we are not always prepared to answer. She tried to get some answers out of her aunt and my sister’s attempt at deflecting with a vague response was thwarted by a cooly logical five-year-old who pointed out that since she’d had two babies she must know these things.

While I’m sure our experience with Maisie helps a lot, Lily has been a blessedly easy newborn. I know that projectile vomit or hourly wakings or stunningly violent tantrums may be in the future (and probably all three at one time or another) but I am happy to appreciate the easy stage while it lasts. She is already becoming more alert and interactive, looking at our faces and turning towards our voices. Maisie is constantly making plans for when she is crawling or walking or dancing and regularly asks me when we can expect these things to happen. A reminder that we will also be privileged to watching these two form their relationship.

I’m so happy to be posting about this little sweater. I made it for the first baby of a dear friend who now lives far away. I knew baby was due to arrive sometime in late August but didn’t know the exact date and early in August started putting together a little box of goodies for baby and mum. Then I realized I absolutely had to knit this baby a sweater.

With little time to spare I started to look for a pattern. It had to be quick so I settled on a few things: it had to be worsted weight or heavier, it had to be in the round with minimal purling, and it had to be the smallest size. It didn’t take me long to settle on Flax. I have quite a few partial balls of Green Label in my stash and I thought these colours would suit an Ottawa baby. I skipped swatching and substituted intuition and a belief that the sweater was more likely to come out bigger than expected than smaller and that’s not really a problem given the way tiny humans grow. Since I was doing stripes I left out the garter panels down the sleeves. I thought the garter would look a little messy with the stripes and it made things go a little faster too.

I finished up this sweater and blocked it on 15 August. I wonder if I was somehow tuned in to this baby because I learned later that she arrived the very next day. The parcel of goodies didn’t reach her until a couple of weeks later but it makes me smile to know that her sweater was finished in time.